There are not such specialties as “product” or “customer success”

I want to make a claim, a very personal, casual and unofficial one, on which I’ll gladly elaborate when the right occasion comes:

There’s no such specialty as “product” nor one as “customer success”

What many in the industry call “product”, it’s actually marketing. And, what people refer to as “customer success”, it’s actually sales.

For one cannot be a marketer if they are not competent in user research, product definition and pricing & packaging.

And, of course, no one can call themselves a sales person if they don’t know that it’s several times easier to (up- and cross-) sell to an existing customer than to a new one; as well as that the job of the sales person is not only to bring a new customer but also to maximize retention and to get word of mouth/ referrals from them for getting more new customers.

Don’t fool yourselves with the sexy titles. They’re nothing but a facade.

Go back to the fundamentals, master the domains of marketing and sales and you’ll find out yourself: Sky is the limit.

ps. I’d of course can make many similar claims in the engineering world, but I’ll leave that for some other time in the future.